Liveable wage for software development?

Summary: Day 1

It occurred to me last night, that for this to be a good experiment, I should keep a daily journal.

Day 1 involved a lot of what I’ll call “Homework” – things like setting up this blog, discussing the idea with some other developers, etc. So far, feedback hasn’t been negative, but has focused on implementation details. Typical programmer/engineer thinking :). Overall, there was at least 4 or 5 hours spent on this sort of thing.

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday (maybe two hours?) figuring out CMake and working on FreeCAD’s OSX build process. Made some good progress there; I have a virtual machine setup to test Homebrew builds with (I use MacPorts, mainly out of habit), and automated the search for appropriate Python executable, headers, libraries. With previous work included, the CMake process on Mac is probably halfway to a standard Linux distro in terms of the number of manual settings required.

Spent some time here-and-there reading and posting to some forum threads, including probably an hour looking at building on old Mac hardware and OS.

Also spent some time (~2 hours) testing a new feature as requested on the forum, tracking down a bug uncovered by that testing, and blogging about it.

So, in total, I feel like it was equivalent to a long day in the office. 0 income, but did get a vague commitment for money in exchange for a task that I haven’t looked at yet.